WINE AND ROSES....

YOU MUST REMEMBER THIS - A Day In My Life On Our Farm In The Willamette Valley

2011-04-24T10:40:00.000-07:00

'You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, a sigh is still a sigh; the fundamental things apply, as time goes by....' I sing softly to myself.

My husband will be home soon. Sometime this evening he will say to me, "Did you exercise today?"

"Of course," I reply with lifted eyebrows.

"What did you do?"

"Well, I began by mucking the horse stalls..."

"Oh," he says, his face falling slightly. "Well, that's a good workout."

To put it mildly, I respond, unspoken.

My husband is a personal trainer and body sculptor; he does marvelous things to his body in a gym on expensive equipment. But workouts for me - time is so precious.

I derive great satisfaction from what I am able to do by myself. A slight 125 pounds at 53 years old, I would be handicapped without my Rubbermaid two-wheeled cart. I bought it as a present to myself last spring after wrenching my arms trying to balance the one-wheeled barrow with a heavy load.

My daily "workout" consists of repeatedly hefting a manure fork full of horse droppings and wet straw, (back, shoulders, arms) twisting it into the cart, (biceps, waist) and pushing it uphill (legs and glutes) up the driveway, down over the lawn to the dumping site, pressing the handles up over my head and tipping the contents out onto the compost pile, (triceps and pecs) turning and pulling the cart behind me, (posture, back, and triceps again) back up over the lawn and down to the upper barn. (I know the terminology; you get the idea.)

I fill the cart full of straw and steer it down to the lower barn where I spread straw in the horse stalls, then fill it again with grass hay cut from our own hay field every summer, stored in the lower barn. I push the cart back uphill and throw the hay out into the sheep and llama pastures, more mud than grass at this time of year. Then I carry three big, heavy buckets filled with grain out into the fields for the ewes and the rams. I'm sure I work every muscle in my body, not in a way likely to sell many fitness manuals, but a way that makes sense to me.

Hay hooks are another great enabler. With hooked extensions, my puny arms become amazingly strong, and I can maneuver great blocks of compressed grasses I couldn't begin to lift without them. I began wielding mine more than 25 years ago, when I was a one-woman horse breeding/green breaking operation in Nevada. The hooks were a gift from a dear friend, an old, wiry, grizzled, gap-toothed Oklahoma cowboy I met by lucky chance, who could do anything with a horse. I absorbed his wisdom like a sponge; to this day, whenever I work with horses I ask myself what he would do, as my final equine authority.

Today I decide to give the ten pregnant ewes their first taste of green candy this lambing season. I lamb late, hoping for good weather, so they are still five or six weeks away, their impending motherhood evident in swaying, stilted stride, swelling bodies atop impossibly spindly legs.

I carefully balance the unwieldy, heavy, welded iron ladder almost vertically up against the cross beams in the upper barn, climb to the top and secure the ladder onto a pole with that great farm fix-all, a piece of baling twine. Then I ease off, working my way around the pole, inching sideways onto a platform. There is no floor here; a wrong step will send me falling into nothingness between the lofts. My hands grip the pole; I don't look down until I'm safely on the alfalfa loft. Then my hooked arm extensions lever, balance, and tumble three 120 pound bales down off the loft onto the gravel floor below.

I maneuver my way around the pole again to the top of the ladder and descend, then roll the bales up onto a wooden flat in the corner, my boots slipping on the feathered lining of a fallen barn swallow's mud nest. The alfalfa looks unpromising, dusty and gray, but when I cut the strings on a bale, the blackish moldy shell cracks to reveal a leafy green inside, even though the bales are over two years old. I call to my "girls" in a high, sing-song voice. They run toward me; they love alfalfa time. I count backs; six black, four white. Or rather six charcoal/taupe, four sweet cream. My fleeces are legendary, long, soft, and curly. I ache for the time to spin again. It's been awhile since I've felt the yarn form magically under my fingers.

The bulbs are up four to eight inches now, depending on the location in regard to the sun; some of them are forming heads. In a week my yard will be a riot of daffodils, hundreds of golden, bobbing bonnets, but today it's early, treacherous February, and the temperature at three o'clock has already dipped to 33 degrees, sending me back out into the chilling afternoon.

I decide to clean and refill the eight big stock water troughs while the hoses still run. I'm in luck; two of them are clean enough to just top off. I don't top them every day because I have to let the water level drop down far enough to tip over for scrubbing, and many of them are heavier than I am. Today I tip and fill five of them, water the fuchsias wintering in the greenhouse, then disconnect and drain all the hoses. I plunge my numb, rubber-gloved hands into the ruff of my huge dog and constant companion, Yukon. He has the thick, double coat of a great silver timber wolf, a not-too-distant ancestor, and is always warm. He is beginning to shed, another harbinger of an early spring. Tufts of soft dog wool cling to my rubber fingers. He licks my frozen chin.

It has already dropped below freezing in the north pasture where the rams live; the hoses almost won't run. That side is always colder. On frozen mornings, I climb over the barbed wire fence to chop ice out of the water troughs with a flat-tined pitchfork, then lift and pitch the chunks out onto the ground so that they don't quickly freeze back together like cracked crystal jigsaw puzzles.

In the rams' trough the ice is always thicker. On very cold nights it freezes almost two inches, but as long as it's only on the top, the water lasts almost a week, and by then the weather has usually broken. Western Oregon has a mild climate, thankfully. When faucets freeze, lugging water in buckets is too hard a workout for me; it makes my arms lengthen, shoulders slope. I'd rather slog through mud than slip on ice, 'though today I have to curl my toes to keep the mud from sucking the boots off my feet.

I sing softly: 'I'd like to swim in a clear, blue stream, where the water is icy cold; then go to town in a golden gown, and have my fortune told - just once, just once, just once before I'm old...." I look down at my stained, baggy blue jeans full of barbed wire holes, and my vision clouds. In my mind, I see myself as a dark-haired teenage girl, sitting at my piano playing and singing this song, when "The Fantastics" was new and life was a promise yet to come. A lifetime of choices ago.

I still have the horses' water to do. It is the most difficult, a 100 gallon tank I really struggle to tip before I can clean and refill. I stand watching the water swirl into the tank, Oasis, our six year old Arabian mare, watching over my shoulder. She turns her head and I breathe warmly into her nostril; we touch noses in silent communion, watching the water, my pale gloved hand light on her warm neck. The wind is chill today; wisps of my white hair tickle my face as Oasis gently pulls the tie string of my hood.

Her Mister Spock ears tuned toward us, our Paso/Arab filly, Amazing Grace, watches intently for any hint of apples appearing from my pockets. Her head snakes forward; she bites the plastic bag of apple slices, swinging away, refusing to give it up. I laugh and pry the bag from her teeth; two sets of gentle horse lips compete for the apples in my palm. We have to fix the dripping faucet stem; it's getting worse. I try to ignore it.

It takes forever to fill 100 gallons. I sing: 'I'd like to dance 'til two o-clock, or maybe dance 'til dawn; or if the band could stand it, just go on and on and on - just once, just once, before the chance is gone..' So many years. Vision blurs again. Why is it so hard to sing that song? 'But I want much more than keeping house; much more, much more, much more!"

Tonight I am a piano player, my favorite thing to be. I'm the primary pianist for a melodrama theater, and tonight I'm in a theatrical production, a mystery spoof on Humphrey Bogart. I have selected over a hundred favorite songs, mostly from the thirties and forties, to play for two hours during dinner and dessert, requests and anything I want to play, like the Rhapsody In Blue, the Warsaw Concerto, Maple Street Rag. And of course, Casablanca's As Time Goes By.

A woman comes up with a request.

"Don't your hands get tired?" she asks me.

"Never," I smile back. I could play for days, weeks, months. Some days, when I am at home alone, after doing the farm chores I sit at my piano almost all day, playing all the great classics, everything I love, losing all track of time. I play from "Fake Books" or "Real Books" the professional pianists call them, big lead sheet books with just the melody line and chord notations so that I can improvise the rest. That way I can't make a mistake; I can play anything, and most people listening can't tell the difference.

My piano was a bequest from a beloved grandmother, left to me because my concert pianist aunt didn't want it, a treasured possession I have moved all over the country with me since I was eleven years old. When I play, in my mind I am in Carnegie Hall, and my fingers fly over the keys, stunned audiences gasping to their feet in spontaneous applause....Tonight I play the request: 'She may be weary, women do get weary, wearing the same shabby dress...She may be waiting, just anticipating things she may never possess...While she's without them, try a little tenderness...'

I stand in the receiving line after the play and a man wrings my hand.

"Oh I loved your music!" he says. "Fifty years ago was my favorite time!" Life was new to him then.

The muscles in my scalp above my ears ache from smiling.

Rebecca Just Wagner, 1997

AD FOR A THROWAWAY KITTEN

2010-02-21T16:08:00.000-08:00

FOUND: One scrawny, starved, throwaway black kitten, about four weeks old, down in one of my sheep fields about 20 feet from the road. Blinded by eyes glued shut with pus, caked with terror-loosened feces, it couldn't do anything but scream, which led me to it.

I followed its cries to find it struggling in circles in the tall dry grass, too small for me to see until I was upon it, but big enough to be a target for a hawk. Not much bigger than a mouse, really; nothing but skin and bone and black fur that looked as though it had already been chewed on by something, it was anything but appealing, and too young to survive on its own.

Why did you do it? Couldn't you wait until it was big enough to be claimed in front of the grocery or feed store?

I've had a lot of throwaways appear on my corner in the eight summers we've lived here, and most of them didn't make it for one reason or another. This one might; it is in a box in my kitchen, bathed, eyes anointed, fed milk through an eye dropper. I couldn't just leave it there for the hawks.

But maybe that's what you were counting on, you who threw it out of your car or truck, that someone would find it who had the heart you lack.

Oh well, a farm can't have too many cats. (Perhaps you thought.) I'll put it in the barn when it is big enough to eat with my barn cats, and it will have to get along. If anybody wants to give it a better life, please call XXX-XXXX.

Rebecca Just Wagner, 1996

Postscript: I ran this ad in the local newspaper. It generated a lot of calls, and the kitten was placed in a loving home. The end. ;-)

THREE CREEKS LAKE, part one

2008-07-28T08:24:00.000-07:00

It's amazing how long a day is when there are no demands on your time. It feels like a life extension. The High Cascades released us a day early from our first camping trip of the season, largely because we felt we had been there much longer than we were, but officially because I hadn't stopped the mail quite long enough.

We hiked around the lake, through some high snow patches left over from last year's record snowfall at about 7000 feet, crossed the snow-melt spring-fed creeks that keep the lake colder than you'd believe, and still had so much time left we almost didn't know what to do with it.

I brought an African Kalimba to play and a book to read, but Walt didn't have his fishing pole and ran out of direction after gathering enough pine knots to keep the fire smoking.

Suspiciously wet looking clouds gathered at sunset, so we tucked into the tent before dark, placed the dogs under trees for shelter, and listened to the soft touch of drops on the rain fly. Sometime during the night I awoke and looked out the mesh door at a sky glittered with stars, so I knew the morning would be dry again. Dry and cold. It didn't freeze this trip, but it was close.

We almost burned the National Forest down with a lighted gas spill from the camp stove, cooked Mountain House freeze-dried meals that tasted much too good to have a virtually unlimited shelf life, sat in sunbeams not quite warm enough to make me want to brave the temperature of the lake, watched the ash from the fire smoke flit about like insects before vaporizing, collected the ubiquitous fine dust on everything, etching lines into clothes, faces, hands, hair, and feet.

We inhaled pine smoke until our nostrils were blackened, largely because we couldn't stay out of its way (why DOES the wind shift so?) wore our grubby fingernails with a proud disregard for microbial threats, drank our distilled water, shrugged at the lack of cell phone towers, and didn't care a whit that the radio wouldn't give us any news. Roughing it. That's what we were doing. Not exactly like our pioneer forefathers, but close enough to make us think we really have a feel for it.

The hardest part, literally and physically, was the unyielding firmness of the ground under the tent. We have the best camp pads known to man: self-inflating "skins" about an inch thick that effectively prevent small rocks and sticks from imprinting on our bodies, but the pain and stiffness that we experienced during the night and the next day were a direct result of the fact that bodies aren't supposed to be so inert. Or constricted. Backs, arms and legs, necks and shoulders, all have curves to them that the ground simply refused to acknowledge.

About three o'clock the second afternoon, we looked at at each other, and thinking, I'm sure, of another night on the ground as opposed to our hand-made juniper bed with its soft space-age memory foam mattress, suddenly decided to break camp and avoid the weekend interlopers.

We plan to go again next week, with the canoe this time. And the fishing poles. And higher pillows. I'll let you know how it goes.

Rebecca Just Wagner

October, 2001

THREE CREEKS LAKE, part two

2008-07-27T14:31:00.000-07:00

Years ago, when people didn't travel as much or as easily, people tended to live fully in one place, and that entails delving very deeply into the details around you. The difference between looking at life through a telescope or a microscope is another way to put it.

Tent camping is a "delving deep" adventure, a microscopic examination of every detail of your chosen surroundings, imprinting them on your memory as indelibly as on the film in your camera. Our next trip to Three Creeks Lake, a pristine Alpine lake over 6000 feet up in the Cascade Mountains of Central Oregon, was just such a quintessential experience.

We arrived late in the afternoon, quickly erected the tent, being old pros by now, and selected chili with beans for our freeze-dried supper. (Just for record, this is a poor choice when you're sharing a tent with another person.) We fired up a log already in the pit, but learned the hard way why it was only half consumed. Don't burn green Jack Pine in a campfire. Our stinging eyes watered painfully until we figured out the cause of the caustic smoke and threw that log into the lake.

With the setting sun the temperature began to drop quickly, and we prepared for a possibly freezing night. I had brought the min/max thermometer from my greenhouse so that we would know just how cold and warm it got. No threat of rain this time, but nevertheless shortly after dark we repaired to the chrysalis of the tent, wrapped ourselves up in several layers of soft clothing and the cocoons of our sleeping bags, and prepared for a cold night.

My sleeping bag is a classic Eddie Bauer Kara Korum sub-zero down mummy, but it's at least 30 years old, and over the years the down has shifted so that there is virtually nothing in the top of it at all, requiring many layers of additional padding both on me and on top of the bag to ensure my thermal comfort. You can imagine the rigors of getting in and out of all those layers.

At our age, a long stretch of unbroken sleep is never likely under the best of conditions, and the campground outhouse is far enough away to be a daunting prospect at night. Even in daylight, I have flash visions of some large mountain snake lurking in its depths, waiting to leap up and bite my unsuspecting person, so an essential element present in the tent is the modern equivalent of the old chamber pot. It even has a female adaptor, remarkably easy and soundless to use.

We had stuffed the car with bed pillows this time, and added our canoe tied to the rack on top, so that rather than pare down to essentials as we had hoped, what we brought, for only 24 hours!, made us resemble something out of The Grapes of Wrath. And of course our two friends took up the back third of the car, 250 plus pounds of hairy wolf-hybrids; I'll tell their story another time. We had considered leaving them behind to give us more freedom to explore with the canoe, but we couldn't resist their expectations. Once we start packing the car, they know where we are going, and to leave them would be heartbreaking for all of us.

We looked at the stars before tucking in, at a milky way so bright it looked like the pathway to eternity, but we couldn't find anything comforting and familiar like the Big Dipper. It was probably hidden behind the mountain rim. The temperature soon chilled us back into the tent. The bed pillows greatly improved our nocturnal comfort, ameliorating the unforgiving firmness of the ground, but given my quite adequate adipose padding, I was surprised that my hip flexors are still so close to the surface, and morning light was both welcome and a long time coming.

We emerged from the tent and checked the thermometer. To our surprise, it had only dipped to 38 degrees, and was up to 46 when we built the morning fire and made breakfast: lightly scrambled eggs, pine smoked English Muffins, and the wonderful warmth of tea in a tin cup held in our hands.

I don't recommend bringing a mirror on a camping trip. Nothing looks worse than shriveled skin in high, dry cold. It must add decades to the face. That, coupled with hair that sticks up in random directions like Dagwood's, creates a morning appearance that only long time devoted mates could love.

The canoe added a whole new dimension to the lake. We took it out in turns because the dogs can't be left unattended. Walt went first to fish, unsuccessfully despite our having seen fish jumping. Then I took a turn, taking first my best friend, Yukon, for a short cruise, then his mother, Schnapps. Both dogs seemed quite at home in the canoe this trip.

The first time we took Yukon canoeing, another trip on another lake, he saw some coyote or bear scat filled with blackberry seeds on a log near the far shore, and decided to examine it more closely. He weighs about 150 pounds, and his legs on the rim of the canoe flipped all of us into the lake. This time, as if remembering his mistake, he carefully stepped over the rim and sat very still while I paddled us around.

The October day was hotter than high summer, hitting 80 degrees in the afternoon, and I decided to do what I had always wanted to do on previous trips but never had worked up enough nerve: I went swimming in the crystal clear snow-melt water of Three Creeks Lake. The shoreline slope is so gradual that a quick, painless plunge is impossible. Several times I made it in up to my knees, only to abort quickly when my legs began to ache. I finally dropped to my knees and actually swam. Imagine someone rubbing ice cubes all over your bare skin and you'll have the idea.

We didn't want to leave this time. Packing up was harder with the canoe, having to fix the straps to hold it tightly on the rack. We had heard no vibration on the trip up to the lake, so we were suprised when on the drive home, the straps began to buzz slightly, growing louder as our speed increased. Walt stopped to adjust them. The buzzing grew louder. Six times he stopped and adjusted; six times the vibrations grew worse than before until the final cacophonous din was so loud we feared losing our sanity. It not only vibrated, it hooted, whistled, and roared! Finally, I, with my knitter's ingenuity, suggested a totally different way to wrap the offending straps, and the buzzing ceased. (Another untapped feminine engineering skill revealed.)

Fixing the straps took so much time that much of the drive home was in the dark, after watching the skyline, pricked by tall firs, fade into a painter's salmon sunset. Driving over the dark mountain passes on a road cut through the tall Douglas Fir, in bugs so thick they looked like snowflakes in the headlights, we munched my home-made trail mix, delicious stuff made of pumpkin and sunflower seeds, sliced almonds, dried cranberries, and raisins.

We drifted happily in the memories of our joyous group howls that had echoed out over the lake, usually started by Walt but quickly joined by Yukon the Alpha's glorious bass, with Schnapps and me contributing the treble tones. The other campers had no doubt of the supremacy of our pack, nor did anyone ever come near us. I wonder why.

Rebecca Just Wagner

October, 2001

THREE CREEKS LAKE, part three, THE WOLVES' VIEW

2008-07-26T16:00:00.000-07:00

"Do you want to go to Three Creeks?" our humans said. We leaped up, smiling widely, panting, pacing.

"Look," said the humans, "They know what we mean."

It always amazes them that we understand what they say. Of course we do, more than they realize. We watched them pack the car, leaving a disturbingly small place for us in the very back of it. The rest of the car was stuffed to the roof with the things they think they need to have fun, when we are all they really need. We figure out how to lie in the car, side by side, crosswise, so that we both fit into a space for one.

It takes a long time to get to Three Creeks. They roll the windows down as we climb higher, and we poke our noses outside and begin to catch the scents: pine, deer, squirrel. We are ever alert; we protect our humans, guide them, lead the way on the trails. We chase off the chipmunks, run in the creek and lake, get wet and sandy, roll in pine needles.

We see dogs approaching; our hackles stand straight up, and our humans snap on our leashes. We threaten and strain on the leashes, but can't reach the dogs or the other humans. At least they never get too close. It's our job to keep all others away.

Our humans eat a lot. We put our wet chins on their knees hoping they'll give us whatever they are eating. We never refuse an offering; to do so might mean less next time. We even eat bananas and grapes. Oranges, apples. But of course we prefer eggs, bacon, cheese. Large bones. Ice cream. They always share what they're eating. And they eat all the time, not twice a day like they feed us. We like breads the best, and cookies. One of us stole a whole loaf of hot, drooly bread once, but got caught and lost it. The smaller human got angry and took it away.

They're living in a small round den up here, but they won't let us in. We can see through parts of it, and we push on the soft covering with our noses. They open it up a little and we shove our heads in as far as we can; they hug us but complain about our hair, and they tell us that our toenails would poke holes in their floor.

We position ourselves at the two openings, on our pads that swelled up when they opened small orange sacks. They call them Thermarests and say we are lucky to have them. It is warmer and softer on the pads, but they aren't as big or soft as the ones we have in our big den at home.

We ran and ran today, jumped up rocks, ran to the edge of cliffs, followed our noses, chased sticks they threw out into the lake. They couldn't get them themselves. We always knew where our humans were; we kept them in sight. Mustn't let them get lost.

Then suddenly they said we had to jump into the back of the car again and go. Jump! Please! After the day we've had?? We hardly move once we're on the road again; too tired. We can still smell all the places we've been; it's stuck to our fur.

When we reach the large den it's dark, and we can hardly walk. We limp into the den and fall onto our pads to sleep. This morning we waited outside beside the car, but they locked us up in our pen and drove another car.

They tell us we'll get to go to Three Creeks again soon!

Rebecca Just Wagner, October, 2001